This happens even when I create a new VMware or VirtualBox VM, install Ubuntu 8, Ubuntu 10 or Debian 5 (all 64-bit) from distribution ISOs make no changes beyond installing the recommended llibgmp3c2, sqlite3 & sysstat, and the zcs tarballs from the zimbra, everything installed with defaults. The 6.0.16 install always succeeds, and the upgrad to 7.* always fails as shown above.

It's clear that conf/my.cnf was not (properly) upgraded. The forums have few complaints of this nature so I'm baffled why such simple & ordinary experiments of mine always fail.